


Hey, Ben!

by scavengethestars



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Actors, BAFTA Awards, F/M, Famous Ben, Famous Rey, Reylo - Freeform, a disaster, apparently lol, but not all angst!, i'm trying to heal from it too, past librarian ben?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:28:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22566301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scavengethestars/pseuds/scavengethestars
Summary: Best friends and co-stars, Ben and Rey, attend the same award show, together but not together.  There's a little bit of tension.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	Hey, Ben!

“Hey, Ben!”

It’s a celebration, after all; for a moment there is a carnival of light dancing in her eyes. It shines directly at him – maybe it’s the flash of a camera, it’s so quick – and then it’s gone. For a split second there’s a pause, a silence so deep that it’s a deafening roar in his ears, and then that too is gone. The space she leaves behind is empty, and then he’s filling it himself, falling into step in her shadow. There are no shadows, truthfully – there is so much light flooding the carpet, and every inch of breathable space, that shadows don’t fall. It’s a sea of light, nimble lightning, and the stampede of voices on every side is the thunder. It’s a storm, and it rages as blindly as one; like any storm, it swallows up the words he might have said back. He hasn’t said them at all, has only felt them rise in his throat. The moment their eyes met, a heartbeat of tension, rendered him silent. Maybe she had spoken it like it was a celebration – she had that talent, they all did – but the way it hit his ears was jarring. The way those two words fell through his chest was worse than that. Heavier than any stone, sharper than any knife. The dying light in her eyes was worse by far.

-

“It’s so quiet in here.”

“Makes you nervous, doesn’t it?”

“No, I mean, I’m not _scared_ , but it is a little unsettling, don’t you think?”

“Nope. It’s what the inside of my head sounds like.”

“You aren’t constantly talking to yourself inside your head? God, that voice only goes quiet when I’m sleeping. And not even then, really.”

“I’ve never really had a voice inside my head. Lots of different voices on the outside, though. Just stating the obvious, I guess.”

“It all seems so genuinely _you_ , though. No matter who you are. Like each one always was the voice inside your head. It’s so seamless. Me, I have to look and look. I have to sort through all the rubble.”

-

She’s sorting through it now: every voice is impatiently overlapping the one that came before it, thrashing and drowning and bullying ahead. It’s all a wordless blur, and she wonders if they know that; what is she supposed to make of it? How is she supposed to parcel words out of that mess? They all demand her attention, starving for a coy glance or a generous dip of the shoulder, and once they have it, they will be cawing over the next bright body in line. The voices are meaningless and the snaps and cracks of the cameras are a greedy tally. Her heart beats thinly under the glare of blank white light, and she can’t imagine what they’re after, or what she can ever give them. There’s warmth blooming at the nape of her neck – who isn’t sweating? – and the din of the crowd will not stop churning. The tide of voices rises higher and higher, and she can’t tell if her head is empty, or if every other voice simply won’t allow her to hear it.

-

“You have a natural talent. Is that the most boring thing you’ve ever heard? You must’ve heard it a thousand times, but it’s true. Not everyone has the energy you do. The intuition, I guess. To know what you need to do, and then to just do it. It’s beautiful.”

“I just want it to work, that’s all. I want the work.” She laughs. It’s such a bright sound that for a flickering moment the darkness almost seems to part, startled. He can see her profile, briefly gilded by the streetlights that reach in through the windows. She goes on.

“But you don’t even need a voice at all. It’s horribly annoying. It’s fantastic. You can tell a whole story with just your eyes. Everyone tells you that, don’t they? You just have this _look_. It’s full of more words than every book in here. And at the same time, it makes you feel like you don’t know any words at all. It just guts you. It guts me, anyway. It makes me feel like you’ve seen all my secrets, and you keep looking anyway.”

-

The cameras are as ravenous for him as they were for her, and his grim reluctance does little to deter them. If anything, the frenzy only worsens. The lenses bore into him with the same battered determination that he bores into them, withholding all and revealing nothing. It’s hard to say if he’s smiling – he has to, at least once – and he knows that anyone daring glances his way now is wondering how much he will tolerate. How little he will give, and how grudgingly he will give it. Those moments are interspersed with lapses of patience, of a faint crease at the corner of his lips, a lift of his chin. He’ll stand still, and wait, bearing the pressure of the stuttering cameras and the burden of desperate voices, tolerant and gentle as a mule. And then he’ll go on, hands resting in his pockets, shoulders taut. He looks out ahead, and over heads, and his heart does its quiet work in his chest. It’s treading carefully around little mines of guilt. When he suddenly catches her looking over her shoulder at him, a spontaneous, wistful pose that the cameras would have shattered for, he catches that guilt in his throat. It chokes his heart’s steady beating, stilling his blood to ice for a moment. For a long moment, as long as he holds her gaze, which is just long enough to be burned by the light that lingers there, and then to watch it fade.

-  
“Hey, Ben?”

He doesn’t answer. He already has. She’s in his lap, his hands at either side of her neck, and she’s hovering above his lips. Her shoulders are drawn so tense that he can feel the slim muscles of her back trembling. _Why do you have keys to this place?_ she’d asked, endlessly tickled that he’d brought her to a library in the dark. _When I got fired, no one cared enough to ask for them back. Why should I give them back, anyway? You never know when you might need a book, or some quiet._

_You got fired from a library?_ she pressed, and he’d pulled her into one of the overstuffed armchairs meant for whiling away hours knee-deep in a good book. She hadn’t stopped him. He can see her more clearly now, in the dark, this close – the tiny moons glinting in her eyes, the fine line of her nose, the moving curve of her lip. No words come, but she’s thinking them. His own lips are parted, which he only realizes as a breath escapes through them. Her fingers are at his jaw, and then his cheeks, as carefully as if she’s reading braille. When she speaks, it’s in exactly the tone reserved for a library. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

He doesn’t answer. His head is silent. Sliding his palm around to the back of her neck, he draws her down into his wordless quiet.

-

When she is at last prompted to step away, she does so as if she’s on the verge of a steep height, dizzy. The crowd is clamoring for someone new. The cameras are insatiable, and so are the reporters. The back of her neck is burning. Last week, on a late-night walk with her closest friend, she was overflowing with praise: he was going to win, he deserved to win, and if somehow he didn’t win, well, he should still be proud. He was on his way to the top. He was making a name, blazing a trail, and bringing countless onlookers to their knees with his eyes alone. What color were they, anyway? Deep woods. She was lost, and had been for some time. They already knew her secret.

_You’re afraid, aren’t you?_ He escorted her home from the library in silence, a silence that was so unstable she didn’t dare tread on it, and his silence is an unbroken plain after that, across the seven days between then and now. The raucous crowd could almost be a relief. She had seen his eyes clearly even in the dark. They drank in the light so deeply, so thoroughly, that he might never be quenched. The light they reflected back spoke more words than he could have. She had too many, herself. How was she ever supposed to keep a secret? And he’d kept looking anyway.

-

He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go. Someone, anyone, would be happy to tell him, but he doesn’t want to be led from one milling group to another. He doesn’t want to be encouraged into uncandidly candid snapshots, and he doesn’t want to wander aimlessly – he’ll be ambushed before long. He doesn’t want to sit and he doesn’t want to stand, and so he walks, a tall, lurking shadow, politely avoiding interaction when he can. Gregarious spirits convene around one another, and he travels the thin paths in between. His eyes drink in the light, hungrier for more with each step he takes, until he spots the glowing source he has been unintentionally orbiting around. Inexplicably, his head is an explosion of words. Spilled, jumbled, tangled, and hitched uselessly in his throat. Approaching her, hands linking behind his back, he can’t sort through the rubble fast enough. She turns before he can speak, eyes rising to his face. Light breaks there so vividly that he almost winces. It doesn’t fade. It is a look, a surrender of affection, that smooths his words to nothing.

Her smile is soft and quiet and unafraid. For a moment, the surrounding clatter and chatter could almost hum into silence. He can almost feel her reaching across that silence to him. She already knows.

“Hey, Ben.”


End file.
